Massachusetts

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Romney,’ by McKay Coppins

      by

      ROMNEY: A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins“For most of his life, he has nursed a morbid fascination with his own death, suspecting that it might assert itself one day suddenly and violently.” One doesn’t expect these opening words from an authorized biography of a handsome, wealthy, happily married and instinctively moderate man, but this is how McKay Coppins’s “Romney” begins. Perhaps Mitt Romney fears his severance from so many blessings, but as Coppins’s revealing new book demonstrates, this businessman-politician has often wondered if he deserved such an abundance of good fortune at all.Coppins conducted 45 interviews with Romney over two years and had access to hundreds of pages in private journals that the now 76-year-old senator has kept since 2011. “Romney” presents a man given to cycles of rationalization and guilt, to sometimes near-O.C.D. levels of repetitive thinking and self-recrimination. The biographer pronounces his “defining trait” to be a “meld of moral obligation and personal hubris.”Romney has, in fact, had two brushes with sudden death, the first in a terrible automobile accident in 1968 when he was a 21-year-old Mormon missionary in France. The second came a half-century later on a January afternoon in the besieged Senate chamber of the U.S. Capitol, to which the better angels of Romney’s conscience had led him after a long up-and-down political life.His father, George, was a progressive Republican governor of Michigan in the 1960s, marching with civil rights activists even as his own church banned Black members from the priesthood. His 1968 run for the presidency collapsed after he referred to the military cheerleading for the Vietnam War as “brainwashing.”Mitt grew up with predictable comforts but nothing like a sense of direction until, during his Mormon mission, sick with diarrhea, he knocked on doors in the French port city of Le Havre that might as well have been brick walls. It eventually “struck him with the force of something divine” that, however futile they seemed, his sacrifices were accepted by God.Once back home he was on his way, along a path both faithful and lucrative, into the expanding worlds of business consulting and private equity in the 1970s and ’80s. Straining to make time for both his church and the five sons he and his wife were raising in suburban Boston, Romney achieved big success at Bain Capital, the investment firm he helped found that guided the office-supply chain Staples toward explosive growth and cut jobs at Ampad, one of the stationery manufacturers that stocked Staples’ shelves.Romney was moving fast, and Coppins himself is a bit headlong in the book’s early going, which includes Romney’s ill-fated 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy. Romney’s later repair of Utah’s shambolic preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics propelled him to a single term as governor of Massachusetts, during which he enacted the health-insurance plan that came to be seen as a state-level precursor of Obamacare. The governor was logical and naïve enough to believe that the program’s success might get him the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But after running into Iowans’ suspicions of Mormonism, he limped toward an early withdrawal from the race.Four years later, he somehow succeeded with Republican primary voters newly jazzed by tea-partying and birtherism and not particularly craving a candidate who had to spend time convincing them that Romneycare was actually quite different from Obamacare. To overcome Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and the two Ricks (Perry and Santorum), Romney needed to dial his rationalization settings high enough to endure mad conversation with the conservative provocateur Glenn Beck.Securing the nomination proved only a prelude to what Coppins, with some justice, calls “one of the pettiest, most forgettable presidential elections in modern history” — no matter that it’s been all downhill since then. Romney was demagogued by Vice President Joe Biden, who told Black voters in one audience that the Republican candidate hoped to “put y’all back in chains,” and mocked by Obama for having observed that Russia would be our most dangerous long-term adversary. But he lost the election mostly on his own, with a gaffe worse than his father’s old brainwashing one: Romney was caught on tape dissing the “47 percent” of voters “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.”Few moments of that year’s campaign will be more cringe-inducing to a reader than Romney’s acceptance of Donald Trump’s endorsement, in Las Vegas, for the Republican nomination. Throughout Coppins’s narrative Trump, the supposed billionaire, morphs from comic relief into devouring nemesis. As late as May 2012, Romney was confiding this description of Trump to his journal: “No veneer, the real deal. Got to love him. Makes me laugh and makes me feel good, both.” Four years later, having come to his senses, Romney refused Trump his own endorsement, earning the candidate’s fury.Romney also sent a blistering email to Chris Christie after the New Jersey governor came out for Trump: “He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic.” Even so, after Trump’s victory, thinking he could perhaps be a force for restraint, Romney allowed himself to be humiliated by Trump’s prolonged public dangling of the secretary of state job.It took two more years for him to arrive at his finest — and final — hours in politics. In 2018, as a handful of anti-Trump Republicans like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake left Congress, Romney jumped in. His becoming a freshman senator from Utah was made possible by his own humility and the Mormon state’s temperamental aversion to the president’s personality, which had helped depress Trump’s 2016 margin of victory in the state.Setting up shop in a lousy basement office, Romney abandoned his plan “to fight Trumpism while ignoring Trump,” at last realizing he had to face the man head-on. While should-have-known-better Republican colleagues waffled (Ben Sasse) or submissively swooned (Lindsey Graham), Romney kept his head above the fetid waters, eventually developing a particular contempt for J.D. Vance, the once anti-Trump hillbilly elegist who reached the Senate via what Romney’s father might have called self-brainwashing. Resistance to Trump’s election-fraud claims left Romney to be jeered by fellow passengers on a flight from Salt Lake City to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021. Even before his vote to convict Trump in a second impeachment, private security for his large family was costing him $5,000 a day.“Romney: A Reckoning” is in many ways a straightforward biography, but it has the intimacy of a small subgenre of political confessions: One remembers Monica Crowley’s “Nixon Off the Record” (1996) and Thomas M. DeFrank’s “Write It When I’m Gone” (2007), a collection of opinions that Gerald Ford wanted to make public, though not too soon.Romney has not waited until he’s dead to unleash his candor and surrender his journals, but he has announced his retirement from electoral politics, on the sensible grounds that it is already too geriatric an arena. Even so, a second Senate term was hardly guaranteed to him. Whatever remains of Mormon distaste for Trump’s vulgarity and meanness, 2024 will be a meaner year than 2018; in a poll taken in the spring, more than half of Utah’s Republicans did not want Romney to run again.Coppins, a fellow Mormon, is generally as polite as his subject, though the characterization of Romney’s “late-in-life attempt at political repentance” seems a bit stark. As this able book shows, Romney almost certainly has less to repent of than the average politician. Indeed, one believes Coppins when he says that “watching Trump complete his conquest of the G.O.P. was even more devastating to Romney than losing his own election in 2012.”The depicted “reckoning” is actually lifelong and, more important, something that has always been made from within. Romney’s moral vitality, for all its fitfulness and ambivalence, has kept him a free man. Only a morally dead one, whose self-worth comes entirely from without, will find that stone walls do indeed a prison make.ROMNEY: A Reckoning | By McKay Coppins | 403 pp. | Scribner | $32.50 More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Oppenheimer biographer supports US bill to bar use of AI in nuclear launches

      by

      A biographer whose Pulitzer prize-winning book inspired the new movie Oppenheimer has expressed support for a US senator’s attempt to bar the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear weapons launches.“Humans must always maintain sole control over nuclear weapons,” Kai Bird, author of American Prometheus, said in a statement reported by Politico.“This technology is too dangerous to gamble with. This bill will send a powerful signal to the world that the United States will never take the reckless step of automating our nuclear command and control.”In Washington on Thursday, Bird met Ed Markey, the Democratic Massachusetts senator who is attempting to add the AI-nuclear provision to a major defense spending bill.Markey, Politico said, was a friend of Bird’s co-author, the late Tufts University professor Martin J Sherwin.A spokesperson for the senator told Politico Markey and Bird “shared their mutual concerns over the proliferation of artificial intelligence in national security and defense without guardrails, and the risks of using nuclear weapons in south Asia and elsewhere.“They also discussed ways to increase awareness of nuclear issues among the younger set.”J Robert Oppenheimer was the driving force behind US development of the atomic bomb, at the end of the second world war.Bird and Sherwin’s book is now the inspiration for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster starring Cillian Murphy in the title role.The movie opens in the US on Friday – in competition with Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s film about the popular children’s doll.On Friday, Nolan told the Guardian: “International surveillance of nuclear weapons is possible because nuclear weapons are very difficult to build. Oppenheimer spent $2bn and used thousands of people across America to build those first bombs.“It’s reassuringly difficult to make nuclear weapons and so it’s relatively easy to spot when a country is doing that. I don’t believe any of that applies to AI.”Nolan also noted “very strong parallels” between Oppenheimer and AI experts now calling for such technology to be controlled.Nolan said he had “been interested to talk to some of the leading researchers in the AI field, and hear from them that they view this as their ‘Oppenheimer moment’. And they’re clearly looking to his story for some kind of guidance … as a cautionary tale in terms of what it says about the responsibility of somebody who’s putting this technology to the world, and what their responsibilities would be in terms of unintended consequences.”Bird and Sherwin’s biography, subtitled The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, was published in 2008.Reviewing for the Guardian, James Buchan saluted the authors’ presentation of “the cocktails and wire-taps and love affairs of Oppenheimer’s existence, his looks and conversation, the way he smoked the cigarettes and pipe that killed him, his famous pork-pie hat and splayed walk, and all the tics and affectations that his students imitated and the patriots and military men despised.“It is as if these authors had gone back to James Boswell, who said of Dr Johnson: ‘Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing.’” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Cheryl Hines Didn’t Expect to Be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Running Mate

      by

      The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actress is beloved in Hollywood. In supporting her husband’s campaign, is she normalizing his often dangerous ideas?On a quiet Thursday in May, there was almost no indication that anyone in Cheryl Hines’s house was running for president. A hockey stick poked out from a bush in front of the Spanish colonial home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Leaning up against a wall outside were several surfboards, caked with wax, at least one of which belonged to her husband, the 69-year-old environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had announced his candidacy for the 2024 Democratic nomination only four weeks earlier. In the foyer, the family’s three dogs wagged their tails near a portrait of Mr. Kennedy’s famous uncle and aunt, John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by the artist Romero Britto. Over the door hung an even larger portrait, of Ms. Hines and Mr. Kennedy, also by Mr. Britto, a friend of the couple.Ms. Hines, 57, has been in many spotlights during her three decades as a professional actress, most famously for her role as Larry David’s wife on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but this new one is different. After a lifetime of not being particularly political, she finds herself not only married to a man from a storied American political family, but also attached to his long-shot campaign for the highest office in the country. (Mr. Kennedy is the son of former United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.) And it seems clear he will need Ms. Hines, who is in the unique position of being more recognizable to some voters than her candidate husband, to help soften his image for those put off by his crusade against vaccines and history of promoting conspiracy theories, such as the false narrative that Bill Gates champions vaccines for financial gain. “I support Bobby and I want to be there for him, and I want him to feel loved and supported by me,” said Ms. Hines, who is a registered Democrat. “And at the same time, I don’t feel the need to go to every political event, because I do have my own career.”Mr. Kennedy, in an interview with The New York Times a few weeks later, said that he sees his wife as crucial to his success. “I think ultimately if I get elected, Cheryl will have played a huge role in that,” he said. “She’s an enormous asset to me, and I don’t think we’ve really unveiled her in her true power yet.” He added: “She has a gift that she’s kind of mesmerizing when she’s on TV and she’s talking, because she’s so spontaneous and she has this what I would call a quick, a fast-twitch reflex when it comes to conversation.”Friends keep checking in on her. Elections can get ugly, and Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, seemingly by design, will put him in contact with many of this country’s more unconventional voters.After a lifetime of not being particularly political, Ms. Hines finds herself not only married to a man from a storied American political family, but also attached to his long-shot campaign for the highest office in the country.Sophie Park for The New York Times“I’m bracing myself for it,” said Ms. Hines of the public scrutiny that comes with campaigning, while sitting in her home office. On the bookshelf, there’s a plaque of her Hollywood Walk of Fame star and a humorous framed photo of Mr. David in a turtleneck and fake mustache, holding a pipe with a note congratulating her. “It is hard not to live in that space of, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going to happen? And is it going to be as terrible as I think?’”In her first interview since her husband announced his candidacy, Ms. Hines initially appeared at ease. She has done hundreds of interviews throughout her career, and as a seasoned improv actress, is known to be quick on her feet and sharply funny. She cut her teeth in the Groundlings, a Los Angeles-based improv troupe; “Curb” is outlined but unscripted. In some ways, answering questions from a stranger is just another form of: “Yes, and.” With improv, “it’s challenging because you don’t know what’s coming next. You don’t know what the audience is going to shout out,” she said. “‘Where are these two people?’ ‘They’re scooping poop in the lion’s den at the zoo!’ Lights go down. Lights go up.”“You have to commit 100 percent,” she continued, “or it’s not funny or interesting.”But here’s a scenario that would challenge even an improv master: You are beloved by fans and peers, and have managed to steer clear of controversy your entire career, but fall in love with a man who touches it off regularly with his often outlandish claims — a man who was kicked off Instagram along with his anti-vaccine nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, for spreading misinformation during the pandemic. (Instagram reinstated Mr. Kennedy’s personal account earlier this month, because of his candidacy.) Who last year drew criticism and later apologized when, at a rally against vaccine mandates in Washington, he spoke against 5G technology, surveillance and what he called “technological mechanisms for control” and said, “even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” Who just this week suggested “S.S.R.I.s and benzos and other drugs” might be responsible for America’s school-shooting problem. (Mr. Kennedy told The Times that assault rifles “clearly make the world more dangerous and we should figure out a way to limit that impact,” but added, “there’s something else happening.”)Now, he is running for president, and you — “a genuine ray of light,” says the producer Suzanne Todd, and whom actor Alec Baldwin has said “everybody loves” — are along for the ride. After years of being able to distance yourself from your husband’s most problematic views, you now risk being seen as at least tacitly embracing them by standing by and smiling if he says things on the campaign trail that are demonstrably untrue.A note of congratulations from Larry David for Ms. Hines’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesA plaque for Ms. Hines’s star.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIntroduced by Larry DavidMs. Hines was raised in Tallahassee, Fla., a thousand miles away— geographically and culturally — from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, Mass., where she and Mr. Kennedy wed in 2014. Her father, who worked in construction, and her mother, an assistant at the Department of Revenue, were private about their politics, if they even had any. “If I ever asked my mom who she voted for, she would tell me it’s nobody’s business and it was her own secret,” Ms. Hines said. “I don’t recall my dad ever once talking about politics or current events, so it was not part of my life. Really, the only thing I knew about the Kennedys was what I learned in public school, in history.”After cosmetology school and the University of Central Florida, her first acting job was at Universal Studios, where she performed the shower scene from “Psycho” up to 15 times a day for a live audience. It was a gig that involved standing in a flesh-colored body suit while an audience member stabbed her with a rubber knife. In her 30s — practically of a certain age in Hollywood years — Ms. Hines was still paying her dues: bartending, working as the personal assistant to the filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner and going to improv classes. Her break came in 1999, when she was cast in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” In 2002, the show won the first of its many Emmys and Golden Globes. Ms. Hines recalled being backstage at the Golden Globe Awards and running into Harrison Ford. When he stopped to congratulate her, she extended her hand and said, “I’m Cheryl Hines. Harrison Ford said, ‘I know who you are,’ and I thought, Oh my God, what?”She and Mr. Kennedy met in 2006 when Mr. David, a longtime friend of Mr. Kennedy’s, introduced them at a ski-weekend fund-raiser in Banff, Canada, for Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental nonprofit co-founded by Mr. Kennedy. Ms. Hines had no plans to ski, “but the next thing you know, we’re in skis and we’re on a ski lift,” she said. “I was looking at Larry like, ‘What is happening?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah,’ giving an indication like, ‘That’s Bobby.’” Ms. Hines said she was aware of Mr. Kennedy’s work as an environmental lawyer, but “I still didn’t know too much about the politics of it all.”By then, Ms. Hines was well entrenched in her own philanthropic work: for the nonprofit United Cerebral Palsy, after her nephew was diagnosed, and for under-resourced schools. “Cheryl was always reachable and accessible to me,” said Jacqueline Sanderlin, a former principal and district administrator of the Compton Unified School District. “She wasn’t a mercenary person. She wasn’t doing this for herself.”Ms. Hines’s break came in 1999, when she was cast in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the HBO show created by Mr. David.Jason Merritt/Getty ImagesMs. Hines and Mr. Kennedy spent time together at another ski event in 2011, when they each were going through a divorce, and eventually began dating long distance. Mr. David never intended for them to connect romantically, Ms. Hines noted. (“Poor Larry,” she said, looking up at the ceiling.) Mr. David told her the relationship was a bad idea, which she said was in jest. “It’s part of the fun of Larry. You just know no matter what you say to him, he’s going to say, ‘Why would you do that? Are you crazy?’”She was attracted to Mr. Kennedy’s wit. “Bobby is very smart and funny, although a lot of people don’t see the funny side,” she said. “He also has this sense of adventure that will catapult me outside of my comfort zone, which I find exciting most of the time.” (How about now, with him running for office? “It seems like, ‘What am I getting myself into?’ Yeah, but, scuba diving.”)Their relationship made headlines when tragedy struck: In May of 2012, Mr. Kennedy’s second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, died by suicide at her home in Bedford, N.Y. Ms. Hines stayed on the West Coast while Mr. Kennedy focused on his children. “I gave him the space and time to heal,” she said. “I think grief is very personal.”When Ms. Hines and Mr. Kennedy got married two years later, Mr. Kennedy gave a speech in which he repeatedly called Ms. Hines “unflappable.” “It was to the level where we joked about it afterward,” said Ms. Todd, a close friend of Ms. Hines. “But he’s actually right, because Cheryl is unflappable.”Her career had continued at a clip: “Curb” returned in 2017 after a six-year hiatus. She joined the cast of the film “A Bad Moms Christmas” along with Susan Sarandon and Christine Baranski, guest-starred in a slew of sitcoms and started a podcast about documentaries with the comedian Tig Notaro.Mr. Kennedy had also been busy. In 2016, he founded the World Mercury Project, which became the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that advocates against vaccines for children. He co-wrote a book on vaccines and began posting anti-vaccine propaganda on social media.During the pandemic, Mr. Kennedy became an even louder voice in the anti-vaccine movement, encouraging people to “do your own research,” even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization deemed the Covid vaccines safe and effective.Mr. Kennedy has long expressed skepticism about vaccines, but his intensity grew with his platform and audience. He published another book, “Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” which has blurbs from the former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, the director Oliver Stone and the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, among others. Ms. Hines stayed out of the fray for most of the pandemic. On her Instagram, she shared images of herself wearing a mask, as well as posts about her involvement with Waterkeeper Alliance — notably never mentioning Children’s Health Defense — and didn’t comment on her husband’s vaccine rhetoric. But then Mr. Kennedy made his Holocaust remark, and claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most visible public health leader fighting Covid, was orchestrating “fascism.”“My husband’s opinions are not a reflection of my own. While we love each other, we differ on many current issues,” Ms. Hines wrote on Twitter. The next day, she tweeted again, calling the Holocaust reference “reprehensible.” “The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything,” she wrote.Ms. Hines’s first acting job was at Universal Studios, where she performed the shower scene from “Psycho” up to 15 times a day.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesMr. Kennedy said it was a difficult time for them. “I saw how it was affecting her life and I said to her, ‘We should just announce that we are separated,’ so that you can have some distance from me,” he said. “We wouldn’t really be doing anything, we would just — I felt so desperate about protecting her at a time where my statements and my decisions were impacting her.” He said he even wrote up a news release, though it never went out. Ms. Hines said that was never an option, although she was upset with Mr. Kennedy for his choice of words. “It was also frustrating to hear Bobby say things that could so easily be twisted into snippets that misrepresented his meaning and didn’t represent who he is,” she said.Several months later, Mr. Kennedy approached her to say he was considering running for office. “It was definitely a discussion,” Ms. Hines said, “because he said, ‘If you don’t want me to do it, I won’t.’” She ultimately agreed. On June 5, Ms. Hines was pulled into a Twitter Spaces conversation with Mr. Kennedy and Elon Musk, even though she hadn’t intended to participate. After she gave a measured comment about how she feels about her husband running for office — “It’s been really interesting,” she said, slowly, “and at times exciting” — Mr. Kennedy said that, to cope with the campaign, Ms. Hines had joked she was going to “invent a new kind of margarita that had Xanax in it.”Seeing ‘Both Sides’ on VaccinesMr. Kennedy’s traction has been surprising. A recent CNN poll found that Mr. Kennedy had support from 20 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters (though not the multiple members of his own family who have publicly said they will support President Biden.) Jack Dorsey, the former chief executive of Twitter, has endorsed him. Steve Bannon has been supportive of Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, floating the idea of a Trump-Kennedy ticket; Alex Jones and other right-wing conspiracy theorists have also expressed enthusiasm. Mr. Kennedy said he has never met Mr. Jones and has “never spoken to Mr. Bannon or Mr. Jones about my presidential campaign.” When asked twice if he would reject an endorsement from Mr. Jones, who lost a $1 billion lawsuit for repeatedly saying the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn., was a government hoax, Mr. Kennedy did not respond. Mr. Kennedy said that he would “love to go on Steve Bannon’s show, but Cheryl just can’t bear that,” so he has not. Back at her home in Los Angeles, what Ms. Hines seemed most excited to talk about was Hines+Young, the eco-friendly company she recently started with her 19-year-old daughter, Catherine Young. It is mostly skin care and candles, and one scent is called Hyannis Seagrass. This — the skin care, the podcast, the film and TV projects — was her world, not whatever was happening on the campaign trail.Ms. Hines does have issues she cares about, including school safety, and “bodily autonomy,” which she said includes abortion but more broadly is the ability to “make decisions about our body with a doctor, not with a politician.” (She declined to comment on whether that includes vaccines.) She had no canned answers prepared about her husband’s political career, but unlike in her improv, seemed unsure what to say. “Bobby is very smart and funny, although a lot of people don’t see the funny side,” Ms. Hines said about her husband. “He also has this sense of adventure that will catapult me outside of my comfort zone, which I find exciting most of the time.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesOn potentially being first lady: “I haven’t really spent time in that space, because we’re not there yet.” On how much she has prepped for the trail: “Every day I learn a lot.” On which current issues, specifically, she was referring to when she tweeted that she and her husband “differ”: “OK. Let me think here.” There was a 49-second pause then, which didn’t resolve in a clear answer. Ms. Hines, who appeared in a 2006 public service announcement encouraging people to get a whooping cough booster vaccine — and who had her own daughter vaccinated when she was young — had not previously commented on Mr. Kennedy’s views. “I see both sides of the vaccine situation,” she said. “There’s one side that feels scared if they don’t get the vaccine, and there’s the side that feels scared if they do get the vaccine, because they’re not sure if the vaccine is safe. And I understand that.”“So if Bobby is standing up and saying, ‘Well, are we sure that they’re safe and every vaccine has been tested properly? That doesn’t seem too much to ask,” she continued. “That seems like the right question to be asking.” Ms. Hines tried to dodge several questions about her views on vaccines, including “Do you think vaccines are dangerous for children?,” eventually answering in a manner that didn’t criticize her husband or reveal much about her own opinion.And Mr. Kennedy has been asking questions about the safety of vaccines for years, his family name and work as an environmental lawyer giving credibility to his skepticism, which he spreads through Children’s Health Defense. In 2019, family members wrote an open letter in which they said, in part, that although they love Mr. Kennedy, “on vaccines he is wrong” and called him “complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate asserted that Mr. Kennedy was one of 12 people responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine content on Facebook. Mr. Kennedy’s campaign website makes no mention of vaccines. Instead, he has positioned himself as a fighter for the middle class and a crusader against corruption, in an effort to appeal to what he has called “all the homeless Republicans and Democrats and Independents who are Americans first.” He wrote in an email to The Times that “the principal villain in the war in Ukraine is Vladimir Putin” but also blamed the war on “State Department and White House Neocons.” In May, he said on Russell Brand’s “Stay Free” podcast that Ukraine is “a victim of U.S. aggression” by way of a “proxy war.” Language included on his campaign website states his intention is to “make America strong again.”Upon learning that an opinion piece in The Washington Post had recently compared her husband to former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Hines’s eyes widened. She tried to make sense of the observation.“His skin is much thicker than mine, let’s just say that,” she said. Mr. Kennedy’s father was killed while campaigning; his uncle was assassinated in office — a horrific loss for the country, but also for a family. “He doesn’t talk about that,” Ms. Hines said. “He’s not afraid of much. I can’t think of even one thing he’s afraid of.”In an interview with Breitbart News Daily — Mr. Kennedy has appeared frequently on right-wing cable shows and podcasts — he said, in response to a question that involved the phrase “cancel culture,” that Ms. Hines’s career had already suffered because of her support for his candidacy. Ms. Hines clarified: “I haven’t lost any jobs because of my support for his candidacy, but there was a project I’m involved in where there was a pause for discussion about how his candidacy might affect what we are doing but it has been resolved.” Mr. Kennedy added that so far, “I feel a lot of support and love from most of her friends, including Larry.” (In a text, Mr. David clarified: “Yes love and support, but I’m not ‘supporting’ him.”)“It was definitely a discussion,” Ms. Hines said about Mr. Kennedy’s decision to run for president, “because he said, ‘If you don’t want me to do it, I won’t.’”Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“But I’m sure there’s people who just don’t talk to me about it, who feel uncomfortable or, you know, whatever,” Mr. Kennedy continued. Ms. Hines said she was getting used to people wanting to talk to her about “their political feelings and thoughts.” Her strategy is to deflect. She said that she responds with a version of, “This is probably something you should talk about with Bobby, although I’m happy to hear your thoughts.” (The day after Mr. Kennedy announced his candidacy, Mr. Reiner, Ms. Hines’s friend and former boss, tweeted his support for President Biden.) Her industry friends, to her relief, are also consumed with their own affairs. “I went to this poker charity tournament the other night, and I thought everybody was going to be really talking to me about politics,” she said. But instead, “everybody was talking about the writers’ strike.”Ms. Hines isn’t a stiff person. Her personality comes out most in the lighter moments: While talking about a scene she recalled from her time with the Groundlings, Ms. Hines broke out into an impersonation of Cher singing “The Hills Are Alive.” She gushed as she talked about her love for her daughter, and how (not completely unlike her character in “A Bad Moms Christmas,” who sniffs her adult daughter’s hair) one of the reasons she wanted to work with her is to keep her close. Ms. Hines is used to talking about her work, too; her upcoming projects include the 12th season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” a new season of the music game show “I Can See Your Voice,” on which she is a judge and the comedic film “Popular Theory.”But when it comes to the campaign, Ms. Hines is more guarded. “This feels different, because it feels like every word is important,” she said. “Before this, really, my world was just about comedy, so I could make light of things. But now I understand people are listening in a different way, and I know that it’s really important to them. ”As the interview wound down, she laid out several Hines+Young body creams on the coffee table to smell. “It’s all about taking care of yourself and relaxing,” she said. “So it’s hilarious that it’s launching right now.”She then walked over to a bookshelf behind the sofa, where white T-shirts with “Kennedy24” printed across the front were rolled up and stacked, like towels at a gym. “I’m going to give you a T-shirt,” she said. “I don’t know who you’re voting for, and you can do whatever you want with it.”She looked around the room again, and then toward the door. “I have all these Kennedy T-shirts.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Democratic states stockpile abortion pills as legal fight for access looms

      by

      Despite a reprieve by the US supreme court, a growing number of Democratic states are stockpiling abortion pills as the legal fight for access to the abortion drug mifepristone is set to continue.On Friday, the supreme court decided to temporarily block a lower court ruling that would have significantly restricted the availability of mifepristone, an FDA-approved abortion medication.Nevertheless, as the case continues to wind through America’s court system and remains challenged by anti-abortion groups, more Democratic states are now stockpiling abortion pills amid an unpredictable legal battle.Earlier this month, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction that suspended the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, calling it a drug that is used to “kill the unborn human”.Swiftly after Kacsmaryk’s ruling, Democratic states have been stockpiling abortion pills including mifepristone as well as misoprostol, the second drug in the abortion regimen which can also be used on its own, although less effectively.At the Massachusetts governor Maura Healey’s request, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has purchased approximately 15,000 doses of mifepristone. The stockpile is expected to offer “sufficient coverage” in the state for over a year.“Mifepristone has been used safely for more than 20 years and is the gold standard. Here in Massachusetts, we are not going to let one extremist judge in Texas turn back the clock on this proven medication and restrict access to care in our state,” Healey said last week.Meanwhile, the Democratic governors of New York and California both announced plans to stockpile misoprostol in attempts to safeguard their states’ abortion access.New York’s governor Kathy Hochul announced last week that New York will be purchasing misoprostol in order to stockpile 150,000 doses, a five-year supply.Hochul also pledged that if mifepristone is removed from the market, New York will commit up to an additional $20m to providers to support other abortion methods.In a similar move, governor Gavin Newsom of California announced last week that the state has secured an emergency stockpile of up to 2m misoprostol pills“We will not cave to extremists who are trying to outlaw these critical abortion services. Medication abortion remains legal in California,” Newsom said, adding that California has shared the negotiated terms of its misoprostol purchase agreement to assist other states in securing the pill at low cost.Since then, additional Democratic states have followed suit.The governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, recently announced a partnership with the University of Maryland’s medical system to purchase a “substantial amount of mifepristone”.“This purchase is another example of our administration’s commitment to ensure Maryland remains a safe haven for abortion access and quality reproductive health care,” said Moore, who also released $3.5m in previously withheld funding for the state’s abortion care clinical training program.On Thursday, Oregon made a similar announcement, with its governor Tina Kotek revealing the state has secured a three-year supply of mifepristone, regardless of the supreme court’s ruling on the pill.“Here in Oregon, I will make sure that patients are able to access the medication they need and providers are able to provide that medication without unnecessary, politically motivated interference and intimidation,” Kotek said.With Democratic states rushing to stock up on abortion pills, the tumultuous legal fight for abortion access is far from over. In the last nine months, 13 states have banned abortion. With anti-abortion groups fighting for increased pill restrictions nationwide, even states that have legalized the procedure may become affected.Following the supreme court’s decision to temporarily block mifepristone restrictions, the next stage of the litigious battle over the drug will take place in the fifth circuit, with oral arguments scheduled for 17 May. The case will then likely return back to the supreme court.In a statement to the New York Times, Erik Baptist, a senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization representing a coalition of anti-abortion groups and doctors, pledged to continue fighting against abortion care.“The FDA must answer for the damage it has caused to the health of countless women and girls and the rule of law by failing to study how dangerous the chemical abortion drug regimen is and unlawfully removing every meaningful safeguard, even allowing for mail-order abortions,” he said about the 23-year-old FDA-approved drug.Meanwhile, the Joe Biden administration and civil rights organizations promised to continue fighting for reproductive rights.“I’ll continue to fight attacks on women’s health. The American people must also continue to use their vote as their voice and elect a Congress that will restore the protections of Roe v Wade,” Biden tweeted shortly after the supreme court issued its decision.The American Civil Liberties Union echoed similar sentiments, with Jennifer Dalven, ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project director saying: “Make no mistake, we aren’t out of the woods by any means … And as this baseless lawsuit shows, extremists will use every trick in the book to try to ban abortion nationwide.”Dalven added: “But if our opponents think we will allow them to continue to pursue their extreme goals without fierce backlash, they are sorely mistaken.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Harvard to rename school after top Republican donor following $300m gift

      by

      Harvard University will rename its graduate school of arts and sciences after billionaire hedge fund executive and Republican megadonor Kenneth Griffin, the institution announced on Tuesday, after a new $300m contribution brought Griffin’s total support of his alma mater to more than half a billion dollars.Griffin, 54, is the founder and chief executive of Citadel, a $59bn hedge fund, and Citadel Securities, which trades securities. He is the 35th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $34.9bn, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.Griffin will be just the fourth individual to have a school at Harvard named after him in exchange for a donation, according to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper. His name will carry controversy thanks to Griffin’s stature as a major political donor to rightwing politicians and his company’s investments in firearm and ammunition manufacturers.Griffin’s companies held investments in gun and ammunition manufacturers worth more than $139m as of March 2022, according to Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ. These included shares in US gun manufacturers Smith & Wesson and Sturm Ruger, as well as US ammunition makers Olin Corp, Vista Outdoor, and Ammo Inc.The investments became a matter of public debate in 2022 when Griffin poured millions into a Republican candidate for the governorship of Illinois. Griffin accused sitting Democrat governor JB Pritzker of failing to combat crime in Chicago, where Griffin’s companies were based. He subsequently moved his companies’ headquarters to Miami.A WBEZ analysis of firearms recovered by Chicago police from violent crime incidents over five years found that nearly one in four were produced by companies in which Citadel invests.At the time, Citadel disputed the importance of the investments, telling WBEZ that they made up “less than .01% of our portfolio” and arguing that a connection to gun violence was “quite a stretch”.Griffin rejected a call by the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper for his companies to divest from gun and ammunition makers, writing in a letter to the editor that “40% of American households own a gun” and that “the violence destroying our city is not the result of … legal gun purchases, but rather a failure to prosecute criminals, a lack of support for police, and progressive left legislation that prioritizes criminals ahead of law-abiding citizens”.He added: “I will not embrace today’s cancel culture nor engage in amateurish virtue-signaling based on blind ideology.”Griffin is also a major political donor and one of the most prominent backers of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom he has urged to run for president in 2024. A one-time fundraiser for Barack Obama, Griffin gave nearly $60m to Republican candidates for federal positions in 2022, according to Politico.Griffin’s close association with DeSantis is another potential reputational issue for Harvard. The Florida governor has staked out extreme positions on education and LGBTQ rights, including by signing the so-called “don’t say gay” bill that restricts Florida teachers from discussing topics related to sexuality and gender identity and banning the state’s public high schools from teaching a new advanced placement course in African American studies.This year, DeSantis unveiled a legislative proposal to remake Florida’s public colleges and universities that included banning critical race theory – an academic theory developed by Black scholars at Harvard Law School – and diversity and inclusion programs and drastically reducing the protections afforded by academic tenure.Asked to comment about Griffin’s association with DeSantis and his policies, a spokesperson for Citadel said: “Ken respects and employs people of all backgrounds.”Griffin’s gift to Harvard was unrestricted, the school said, and will go to the faculty of arts and sciences, which includes the undergraduate college and PhD programs. In 2014, Griffin made a $150m donation to the elite private university, primarily to fund financial aid. At the time, it was the largest single donation in the institution’s history.“Ken’s exceptional generosity and steadfast devotion enable excellence and opportunity at Harvard,” said Harvard president Larry Bacow in a statement. “I am deeply and personally appreciative of the confidence he has placed in us – and in our mission – to do good in the world.”Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Got a tip on this story? Email Stephanie.Kirchgaessner@theguardian.com More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We will not cave’: governors stockpile abortion drugs as access is threatened

      by

      Several Democratic governors have moved swiftly to protect access to medication abortion in their states after a ruling by a Texas judge late last week threatened access to the widely used abortion drug mifepristone.In an announcement on Monday, Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts said her state had ordered about 15,000 doses of mifepristone, the first of two drugs in a medication abortion regimen that has been approved for use up to the 10th week of pregnancy.Healey also issued an executive order that she said would help protect access to medication abortions and shield providers who perform them.In California, Governor Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, said his state had secured an emergency stockpile of up to 2m pills of misoprostol, the second drug in the regimen that can be used safely on its own, though is slightly less effective as a single medication. That drug, which is used to treat other medical conditions, is also being targeted by anti-abortion groups seeking to remove it from the market.“In response to this extremist ban on a medication abortion drug, our state has secured a stockpile of an alternative medication abortion drug to ensure that Californians continue to have access to safe reproductive health treatments,” Newsom said in a statement. “We will not cave to extremists who are trying to outlaw these critical abortion services. Medication abortion remains legal in California.”Their actions come after US district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of Donald Trump known for his anti-abortion views, issued a ruling late on Friday that invalidated the 23-year-old approval of mifepristone by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On the same night, a federal judge in Washington state issued a contradictory ruling that ordered the FDA to maintain the drug’s approval in at least 17 states where Democrats had sued.On Monday, the US justice department appealed the Texas ruling, asking a federal appeals court to place a hold on the “extraordinary and unprecedented order”. Underscoring the legal uncertainty surrounding the dueling orders, the administration separately asked the federal court in Washington state for clarity.With access to the drug imperiled, and Democrats stymied in Washington by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, a handful of liberal state governors said they were taking matters into their own hands.“A judge has made a politically motivated decision to override doctors, patients and medical experts and block access to critical medications,” Healey said on Monday, unveiling the plan at a press conference outside the Massachusetts statehouse in Boston. “Today, we collectively are saying loud and clear: not on our watch.”In anticipation of the Texas ruling, the Democratic governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, announced last week that his state would stockpile a three-year supply of mifepristone in the event the drug became more difficult to access. Days later, Kacsmaryk issued his ruling.Several other Democratic governors and state attorneys general have condemned the ruling while seeking to make clear that, at least for now, the drug remains available. Some went further, promising to keep medication abortion legal and accessible in their states, although without providing further details.More than half of abortions in the US rely on medication abortion, and most of those involve the two-drug protocol. If the appeals court doesn’t intervene, the Texas ruling would take effect on Friday with far-reaching implications for access.The FDA approved mifepristone to terminate pregnancy in 2000, when used with misoprostol. Despite claims made in the Texas lawsuit, there is decades’ worth of scientific research concluding that mifepristone is safe.States have become the epicenter of the fight over abortion rights since the supreme court’s landmark decision last June to overturn Roe v Wade. Since then, more than a dozen Republican-led states have enacted abortion bans or severely restricted access to the procedure.​Anti-abortion groups have long targeted medication abortion, the most common method for terminating a pregnancy in the US. But it became the focus of efforts after the supreme court’s landmark decision last June to overturn Roe v Wade, allowing states to regulate abortion.Although more than a dozen Republican-led states moved quickly to ban or severely restrict abortions​, with scores of new limits pending before state legislatures this session, Democratic-led states have pushed in the opposite direction. Yet if the Texas ruling stands, experts say it would upend access nationwide, limiting the drug even in states where abortion is legal.Abortion opponents in blue states denounced the efforts by Democratic governors to preserve access to medication abortion.“It is appalling that Gavin Newsom is so obsessed with ending the lives of children in the womb that he is attempting to stockpile dangerous and potentially illegal drugs,” California Family Council president Jonathan Keller wrote on Twitter. “California again proves the only ‘choice’ they care about is abortion.”Newsom said the judge’s ruling “ignores facts, science and the law” in a way that puts “the health of millions of women and girls at risk”.“Abortion is still legal and accessible here in California and we won’t stand by as fundamental freedoms are stripped away,” he said.Other supporters of abortion rights similarly denounced the conservative judge’s decision on abortion as “unprincipled” and out of step with the American public. In states where the issue has been put on the ballot, from right-leaning Kansas to battleground Michigan and liberal Vermont, voters have opted to preserve or expand access.“I’ve fought like hell to protect abortion access and I’m not backing down,” Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, said on Friday. “I will keep taking steps to expand access to reproductive healthcare and fight against anyone threatening our rights.”Whitmer recently signed legislation repealing the state’s nearly century-old abortion ban, after Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative in November to enshrine abortion protections into the state constitution.Democrats and reproductive rights advocates believe the issue will continue to motivate voters in the coming election cycles after lifting them to victories across the country in the 2022 midterms. Last week’s election of a liberal judge to serve on the Wisconsin supreme court brought fresh evidence of the enduring potency of abortion politics.“This decision will only enrage Americans further and move them to more action,” Mini Timmaraju, president of the Naral Pro-Choice America advocacy group, said on a call with reporters on Monday. “Our eyes are on 2023 and 2024 – 2022 was just the beginning.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Wellesley College students vote to admit trans men and non-binary people

      by

      Students at the famed Wellesley College for women voted this week to extend admission to trans men and non-binary students, though campus administrators have said there is “no plan” to immediately change school policy.In a non-binding election on Tuesday, students at the liberal arts college in Massachusetts voted to open admission to all non-binary and transgender students, including trans men, reported Wellesley News, the college’s student newspaper.Wellesley’s alumni include former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, ex-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and other public figures.The proposed resolution, which will be presented to Wellesley’s board of trustees, would allow trans men to be admitted to the university. Non-binary applicants, regardless of their sex at birth, would also be considered for admission, according to the resolution approved by students.The ballot measure would also call for the university to replace gender-specific language with gender neutral language in reference to its student body, including using they/them pronouns in place of she/her pronouns, according to CNN.The admissions policy which students have voted in favor of modifying notes that anyone who identifies as a woman is eligible for admission, the college’s website says.Non-binary students “who were assigned female at birth” are currently considered eligible for admission. But trans men are not considered for admission.Students have argued that the resolution came in part because of students who transitioned in college and felt excluded by the university’s use of descriptors including “women” and “alumnae”, the Boston Globe reported.Despite the student support, Wellesley administrators have said they will not consider the ballot measure ratified by students.“Although there is no plan to revisit its mission as a women’s college or its admissions policy, the college will continue to engage all students, including transgender male and non-binary students, in the important work of building an inclusive academic community where everyone feels they belong,” Wellesley’s media relations director, Stacey Schmeidel, said.Wellesley’s president, Paula Johnson, spoke about the proposed question last week in an open message entitled: “Affirming our mission and embracing our community.”Johnson’s message said: “Wellesley is a women’s college that admits cis, trans, and non-binary students – all who consistently identify as women.” Johnson added that Wellesley’s being both a “women’s college and a diverse community” was not a mutually exclusive proposition.Several students were critical of Johnson’s open message, with the Wellesley News’s editorial board calling out Johnson for intervening in student discourse and neglecting to mention legislative attacks on transgender people in her broader statement.“The Wellesley News editorial board is once again stating that transgender and non-binary students have always belonged and will continue to belong at Wellesley, a historically women’s college,” the editorial board wrote in a letter.Students have previously criticized the university’s lack of inclusive language for transgender and non-binary students.Students also have urged Wellesley’s board of trustees to keep a mural featuring the transgender flag which was powerwashed in 2021.School administrators have said that they support students who transition after being admitted, noting on their website that “[once] accepted to Wellesley, every student receives the full support and mentorship of college faculty, staff, and administrators through graduation”.Wellesley currently has no data on how many transgender and non-binary students attend the college, according to the New York Times. More